The White House has rolled out a memo, named A Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education to nine of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, including MIT, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania among others. The document dictates how universities should admit students, hire faculty, and shape campus life, linking compliance to federal rewards.
At the heart of it lies a measure that could redefine the future of US higher education: a proposal to cap international undergraduate enrolment at 15 per cent. The nine-page directive goes further, restricting the number of students from any single country to no more than five per cent.
Even before any cap is enforced, the intake is sliding. According to the International Trade Administration, just over 313,000 international students entered the US in August 2025, a 19% drop from August 2024. Cumulatively through August, total arrivals were down nearly 12% year-to-date.
The slide was sharpest among Asian students—the largest cohort of US visa holders—with arrivals falling 24% overall, including a 45% decline from India and 12% from China. African students saw the steepest proportional fall at 33% (from a smaller base), while Western Europe registered a negligible decrease of less than 1%. That’s the border-level squeeze; now, here’s how it shows up on campus rosters.
The thinning pipeline shows up most starkly in who actually arrives. A latest Reuters report puts numbers to the drift. After speaking with administrators or spokespeople at ten high-intake campuses, the agency reports all ten logged declines in international enrolment this fall—from a 1% dip at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to a 19% slide at the University at Buffalo. Illinois now counts 13,268 international students; Buffalo 4,087, Reuters notes.
Here’s the sting in the tale: Both universities actually welcomed more international freshmen, but the graduate funnel collapsed, pulling totals down. The sharpest pain is at the lab-ready end of the pipeline—first-year graduate intake down 22% at Illinois and 58% at Buffalo, according to Reuters. In other words, the research engine is losing torque precisely where it needs momentum.
In Chicago, DePaul University is the latest casualty. This fall, international enrollment dropped by 30%, wiping 755 foreign students from its rolls according to Reuters report. First-year graduate enrollment fell even steeper, by nearly 62%.
President Robert Manuel warned faculty of a hiring freeze, executive pay cuts, and strict spending curbs, describing the challenges as “so severe and debilitating that it’s getting hard to recognize higher education anymore.”
The Trump administration’s sweeping changes to immigration and education policies have chilled the flow of global talent into US classrooms.
Tightened visa procedures, federal funding cuts, and the specter of enrollment caps have sent international students elsewhere, destabilizing universities already strained by shrinking domestic enrollments and rising operational costs. What once appeared as isolated setbacks now resembles a nationwide crisis.
The compact, sent to nine initial institutions Wednesday, set out a sweeping list of demands including capping international enrolments, banning the use of race or sex in hiring, freezing tuition for five years and mandating standardised testing in admissions.
The memo said: “No more than 15% of a university’s undergraduate student population shall be participants in the Student Visa Exchange Program, and no more than 5% shall be from any one country.”
For colleges whose current internationals student populations are above 15%, incoming classes should meet the new cap, it said.
The White House said universities that sign on to what it labelled the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” would get “multiple positive benefits” including access to federal student loans and research funding, approval of visas for international scholars and preferential treatment under the tax code.
The memo said that international students should be supportive of “American and Western values,” urging colleges to “screen out students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.”
This June, the administration resumed student visa interviews after a near month-long global pause and implemented enhanced social media screening of prospective international students to identify any potential signs of “hostility” towards the US government or culture.
Wednesday’s correspondence from the White House also says universities must be prepared to share all known international student information, including discipline records, upon request with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the State Department.
The new demands were sent to Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia, the White House said.
It is understood the compact could be extended to all US colleges.
According to the White House official, universities were chosen because their leadership indicated they could possibly assist in the efforts and provide feedback on the proposal, Bloomberg reported.
